The devil is always in the details.
The NBA still plans to launch NBA Europe in the fall of 2027, but as negotiations with potential partners get serious, sticking points have emerged around players moving from the NBA to Europe and, of course, money. Specifically, the franchise fees teams will pay and the revenue distribution from the new league have led to friction, all things Joe Varden detailed at The Athletic.
The headline-grabber was the request for a soccer-style transfer window in the new basketball league. In that proposed window, it’s not a trade of players while teams try to navigate a salary cap (like the NBA and other American sports leagues), it’s a purchase of a player’s contract — and the league’s new potential partners want to be able to purchase NBA players’ deals. Varden at The Athletic lays out this scenario.
Imagine it: A rich, powerful, proper football conglomerate overseas starts a basketball team. It picks up the phone and dials the Milwaukee Bucks, who, for the sake of argument, are having a rough season. The club says, hey, here’s a couple hundred million dollars, or whatever it may cost, how about Giannis Antetokounmpo coming to play for us in NBA Europe?
The NBA quickly and emphatically said no to this idea. Multiple times. It wants the leagues to be separate entities, and while players can jump from the NBA to Europe as free agents, the league doesn’t want that kind of in-season movement. The NBA might envision something more akin to the MLS in soccer, where some older stars from European leagues come stateside and earn paychecks for a few more years.
The kind of investors the NBA wants in Europe — powerhouse soccer programs (which the NBA also needs for the built-in fan bases), or very deep-pocketed investors such as public or sovereign wealth funds — appeared to pause at the idea of essentially investing in a minor league, as one anonymous source told Varden.
“There are restrictions on NBA Europe teams acquiring players from the U.S. unless they’re free agents, and that obviously reduces the competitiveness of the NBA Europe project. It becomes a feeder league, which is not what anyone particularly wants.”
Of course, the bigger issues are about money. It’s always about the money.
What the NBA envisions is a 16-team league with 12 permanent members and four teams that earn their way in through play in their domestic leagues (if that sounds a lot like the proposed soccer “super league” of a few years back, which died amid intense fan backlash, you’re not wrong). The teams in that league would pay a licensing fee to be part of NBA Europe — with the fee pricing would be on a sliding scale based on market size — and would split the revenue from the league with the NBA.
All of which has led to two sticking points.
One is the licensing fees — teams are being asked to pay a fee and make major infrastructure upgrades (one of the ways the NBA believes European clubs leave money on the table is a lack of modern arenas and amenities). The sliding scale appears to have offended the sensibilities of some potential European partners.
“Why should one pay less or more than the other — there should be some coherence around the valuations,” the representative for a potential NBA Europe said.
Another issue is the revenue split. A source told Varden the league proposed a 52%-48% split, with the larger share going to the NBA, but the NBA itself denied that. The NBA said it would invest its share of the revenue back into its European league until such a time as it turned a profit, and at that point NBA owners would take a percentage of that. All those percentages are still to be worked out.
All of this is to say that while the NBA is moving full-speed ahead toward a 2027 launch of NBA Europe, there is still a lot of work to be done and investors to convince. It likely gets done, but who is involved and exactly what this will look like remains up in the air.
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